Until now the PI-Index mainly contains image and text documents enriched with structured and unstructured meta information about the documents. As a result of the conversion of the collection to an electronic counterpart the inclusion of other documents like films, audio documents etc. is complementing the WEL collection encompassing further facets of political iconography concepts.

In the first phase of the project a commercial Relational Database System (ORACLE Version 8) is used for the persistent storage of the meta data. The multimedia documents (images, texts, etc.) are managed in the file system with links from the meta data to these documents. Furthermore, database system extensions like packages for retrieval support are tried out for the management and processing of the multimedia documents exploiting the opportunities and limits of the employed technology for this class of applications.

The technology decisions for the further project phases and for the final version of the WEL are based on the gained experiences.